Last year I attended the SLG Regional Event at Cambourne Village College and indicated that I would be happy to present at a future event when I filled in the evaluation form. So I was pleasantly surprised when I received an email from SLG in the summer asking me if I would like to present at the regional event in November this year. OK, I thought, this is good practice for networking, speaking in front of my peers and creating a conference presentation.
So I said yes, and left it for a bit, then I got another email asking me what I would be speaking about.
At which point I thought, "good question, what am I going to speak about?" I've been a school librarian for two years; I'm not responsible for major initiatives; I don't do any research. What am I going to tell a room full of school librarians that they may find interesting?
The only thing that I can really talk about with any knowledge is myself. "Aha! That's it. That's what I'll talk about". Not my entire life story of course, that would be dull, and take infinitely more than twenty minutes. However, my route into school librarianship via Higher Education might be interesting, and it would definitely be different.
So a couple of weeks ago I started to think about my career path: how I started working in libraries; the libraries I have worked in; the skills gained in each post. And I began to formulate a talk in which I looked at my career in HE, and the skills needed in that sector, and thought about how I applied them in a school library context.
And as I hate PowerPoint (because they are inevitably boring, whatever you do to jazz them up) I created a simple Prezi to show my career path, what I learned along the way, what made me switch from HE to Schools, and what I'm planning on doing in the future.
There were notes which I wrote to accompany the Prezi, but I didn't use them. I found that if you really know your subject, you only need a few prompts and some visual stimulus to help you talk about it. Of course, there were things I'd written in the notes that I know I didn't say, and there were things I said that weren't in the notes, but if you constrain yourself to the script in front of you, all spontaneity is lost and there is no opportunity to take advantage of the reaction of your audience.
Either I came across as a fun, enthusiastic School Librarian who is enjoying working as such, or twenty people at Oakham School spent 15 minutes laughing at a complete and utter fruitcake.
Well, at least it wasn't dull.
So I said yes, and left it for a bit, then I got another email asking me what I would be speaking about.
At which point I thought, "good question, what am I going to speak about?" I've been a school librarian for two years; I'm not responsible for major initiatives; I don't do any research. What am I going to tell a room full of school librarians that they may find interesting?
The only thing that I can really talk about with any knowledge is myself. "Aha! That's it. That's what I'll talk about". Not my entire life story of course, that would be dull, and take infinitely more than twenty minutes. However, my route into school librarianship via Higher Education might be interesting, and it would definitely be different.
So a couple of weeks ago I started to think about my career path: how I started working in libraries; the libraries I have worked in; the skills gained in each post. And I began to formulate a talk in which I looked at my career in HE, and the skills needed in that sector, and thought about how I applied them in a school library context.
And as I hate PowerPoint (because they are inevitably boring, whatever you do to jazz them up) I created a simple Prezi to show my career path, what I learned along the way, what made me switch from HE to Schools, and what I'm planning on doing in the future.
There were notes which I wrote to accompany the Prezi, but I didn't use them. I found that if you really know your subject, you only need a few prompts and some visual stimulus to help you talk about it. Of course, there were things I'd written in the notes that I know I didn't say, and there were things I said that weren't in the notes, but if you constrain yourself to the script in front of you, all spontaneity is lost and there is no opportunity to take advantage of the reaction of your audience.
Either I came across as a fun, enthusiastic School Librarian who is enjoying working as such, or twenty people at Oakham School spent 15 minutes laughing at a complete and utter fruitcake.
Well, at least it wasn't dull.
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